The Sandstone House, Siem Reap

We arrived after a dawn at Angkor, dust-streaked and templed-out, and the Sandstone House received us like a cool exhalation. Set down a quiet lane off Sivatha Boulevard in the old French quarter, it is a rare thing in Siem Reap: a contemporary building that takes the temples seriously without aping them. Walls of hand-laid local sandstone, the same warm grey as Angkor's galleries, frame a sequence of courtyards, water channels and a long reflecting pool. A single dvarapala-inspired carving guards the entrance; otherwise the design is spare, modernist, all line and shadow. Frangipani perfumed the still air, and the roar of the boulevard dissolved within a few paces of the door.

The room

Our room, a Courtyard Suite, gave onto a private walled garden through a wall of teak-framed glass that slid fully away. Inside, the material restraint continues: a feature wall of dry-laid sandstone, polished concrete floors warmed by a Khmer silk rug, a low platform bed, and lighting kept deliberately low and golden. Craft anchors the calm, a hand-hammered brass basin, a pair of carved temple-rubbing prints, ikat cushions woven in a village near Takeo. The bathroom opens to its own slice of garden and a rain shower under the sky. Best of all is the silence, thick and complete, broken at dawn only by birds and the distant chime of a monastery bell.

Angkor's craft, translated into the present tense.The Suite Edit

Service & food

Service is the standout, gracious and deeply Khmer, run by a team who pre-empt your needs before you voice them; a cold towel and tamarind juice met us at the door each time we returned from the temples, unbidden. The restaurant is genuinely destination-worthy, a refined Khmer tasting menu drawing on royal-court recipes, the fish amok silky and the prahok-cured dishes handled with restraint, served beside the pool under the stars. Breakfast brings num banh chok rice noodles with a herb-heavy green broth, and proper Cambodian coffee. The spa, in a sandstone pavilion at the garden's end, undoes the ache of clambering over a thousand-year-old causeway.

The verdict

The Sandstone House is for design-minded temple pilgrims who want their Angkor days bookended by serious calm and serious food, and who appreciate architecture that converses with its context rather than costuming it. Couples and discerning solo travellers will be delighted. The honest caveat is location: the quiet lane that gives the hotel its blessed silence also means a ten-minute walk or a short tuk-tuk to the buzz of Pub Street and the Old Market, and the immediate surroundings are residential rather than scenic. For most guests, returning from the crowds to this stone-walled hush will feel less like a compromise than the entire point.